Services

According to the Gartner Global Telephony and Messaging Forecast 2016–2023, 2020 marks the first time in history that spending on cloud-based telephony and messaging surpassed spending on on-premises solutions. While this is clearly a benefit to Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) providers, there are also misconceptions around these offerings. Organizations need to tread carefully and deliberately as they consider moving collaboration to the cloud.

This past year has been one of the busiest of my professional life.

In previous years, leaders at some organizations that purchased new collaboration tools thought they couldn’t afford to include adoption services as well. But now, with employees largely working from home, many organizations are discovering that they can’t afford not to invest in an initiative that helps users leverage new solutions in ways that will enable them to overcome fragmented communications and work together effectively — no matter where in the world they happen to be.

Here’s why 2020 was the year when many business and IT leaders discovered just how essential adoption services are — and why these services will continue to be in demand in 2021 and beyond.

Don’t buy ServiceNow for your service desk.

While this statement sounds radical, our experience shows that, often, a CIO or IT director brings ServiceNow into their organization to help manage service desk operations. There may be some consideration about additional IT processes, like change management, but in most cases the imagined usage is limited to base IT service management support operations.

This approach provides a spot solution at best that leaves your organization ripe for technology sprawl and will limit your opportunities to work more efficiently through shared data and integrations. When planning your business case for ServiceNow, look beyond your IT service desk with an enterprise architecture perspective.

In the world of risk management, we spend a lot of time preparing for the unexpected, because we know that unexpected events will inevitably occur. This mindset colors everything we do in our professional careers and often spreads to our personal lives as well. I’ve endured eye rolls from my children when I forced them to participate in fire drills, what-if disaster scenario discussions and other preparedness exercises. But I know that thinking through how we would handle a surprising situation in advance arms us with a plan of action should it actually occur.

Does your organization have a plan of action in the event of a major cybersecurity incident? Sure, you likely have an incident response plan sitting somewhere on a shared drive, but is it covered in digital cyber dust, or is it an active document that the team embraces as part of a daily routine? Regular practice helps keep your plan fresh and your team prepared to spring into action at a moment’s notice. CDW offers two services designed to shake that cyber dust off of your plan.

Many companies were already adopting collaboration technologies before the coronavirus pandemic hit last spring. But the massive shift to a remote work model has created a sort of forced proof of concept for numerous businesses, with employees and managers learning on the fly how to use these tools to support productivity and collaboration.

One thing that many business and IT leaders have discovered: Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) solutions and a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) are often a good fit. UCaaS refers to cloud-delivered capabilities, including voice and telephony, meeting solutions, messaging, presence and other communication applications. With SD-WAN, advanced software simplifies the operation of complex WANs while optimizing the end-user experience.

Here are several reasons why these two technologies work so well together.

While a COVID-19 vaccine is encouraging, companies are still facing a tremendous challenge to keep the wheels turning while teams work remotely. IT and Finance teams are under huge pressure to optimize IT spend in the short term while looking at the long-term effects of their decisions.